EALC 47100/HIST 41101: Everyday Life in Socialist China

Tuesdays, 3:00-5:50, Pick Hall 222

Jacob Eyferth,

“What is familiar is not known” (G.W.F. Hegel)

“Question your tea spoons” (Georges Perec)

This graduate course will examine the vast and elusive realm of “the everyday” in post-1949 China, with special attention paid to the 1950s and 1960s – a time in which many aspects of everyday life were rapidly transformed. In the first few weeks, we will review different approaches to the everyday, ranging from mid-twentieth-century critiques of everyday life (Fefebvre, Debord) to recent feminist studies and from the Annales school and Norbert Elias to German Alltagsgeschichte. In the second part of the course, we will look at different aspects of the everyday in the early PRC (and, for comparative reasons, the Soviet Union), including work routines, leisure and play, domestic life and consumption, and everyday strategies of coping with political and economic change. Rather than trying to conceptualize “modernity” through everyday life, as much recent work has done, we will focus on the concrete, the experiential, and the mundane. Readings will be in English and Chinese, and students are encouraged to use primary sources for their essays.

Format and evaluation: Regular and active participation is expected. Your main task in this course is to write a research paper on aspects of everyday life in socialist China, using primary sources in Chinese. Alternative assignments can be found for students without knowledge of modern Chinese. In weeks 4 or 5, you will present a source text and a short outline of your project in class. In weeks 7 or 8, you will present a five-page fragment of your research project. Evaluation: 20% attendance and participation, 20% source presentation, 20% fragment presentation, 40% research paper.

Required readings: Madeleine Yue Dong and Joshua Goldstein, Everyday Modernity in China, University of Washington Press, 2006, and CHALK postings.

Week 1: Introduction: What is Everyday Life?

• Georges Perec, “Approaches to What?” in Ben Highmore, The Everyday Life Reader, pp. 176-78.

• Guy Debord, “Perspectives for conscious alterations in everyday life” Ben Highmore, The Everyday Life Reader, 237-245.

• Mass Observation: letters by Charles Madge and Humphrey Jennings; four anonymous Mass Observation Reports, in Ben Highmore, The Everyday Life Reader, pp. 145-52.

• Norbert Elias, “The Rise of the Fork” in J. Goudsblom and S. Mennell, eds. The Norbert Elias Reader, pp 51-54.

Week 2: Concepts

• Norbert Elias: “On the concept of everyday life,” in J. Goudsblom and S. Mennell, eds. The Norbert Elias Reader, pp. 166-74.

• Michel de Certeau: The Practice of Everyday Life”, general introduction, pp. xi-xxiv.

• Michael E. Gardiner, Critiques of Everyday Life, Routledge 2000, Chapter Four: Henri Lefebvre: philosopher of the ordinary, pp. 71-101.

• Henri Fefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, vol. 3, Verso 2005, Introduction, pp. 1-42.

Additional readings: Michael E. Gardiner, Critiques of Everyday Life, Routledge 2000;

John Roberts, Philosophizing the Everyday, Pluto Press 2006; Agnes Heller, Everyday

Life, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984; Doris Smith, The Everyday as Problematic,

Milton Keynes, 1987; Tony Bennett and Diane Watson, Understanding Everyday Life,

Blackwell 2002; Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life (three vols), Verso 2005.

Week 3: Histories

• Fernand Braudel: The structures of everyday life (vol. 1 of Civilization and Capitalism, 15th to 18th Century), chapter 3, “Food and Drink.”

• Lu Hanchao: “Out of the Ordinary: Implications of Material Culture and Daily Life in China,” in Joshua Goldstein and Madeleine Yue Dong, eds., Everyday Modernity in China, pp. 22-51.

• Alf Lüdtke: “The Historiography of Everyday Life”, in Raphael Samuel and Gareth Stedman Jones, eds., Culture, Ideology, and Politics.

• Harry Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan, Princeton 2000, chapter 3, pp. 95-101.

Additional Readings: Joshua Goldstein and Madeleine Yue Dong, Everyday Modernity in China, University of Washington Press, 2006; Yeh Wen-hsin: “Corporate Space, Communal Time: Everyday Life in Shanghai’s Bank of China, The American Historical Review. 100.1, 1995;

Week 4: Work

• Kendall Bailes, “Alexei Gastev and the Soviet Controversy over Taylorism,” Soviet Studies, 29:3 (July 1977), 373-394

• Miklos Haraszti, A worker in a workers’ state, selected chapters.

• Cui Zhiyuan 崔之元, “Anshan xianfa he hou Futezhuyi” 鞍钢宪法与后福特主义 (The Angang constitution and post-Fordism)

• Michael B. Frolic: Mao’s People, chapters 4, “A foot of mud and a pile of shit”, chapter 13, “The apprentice”.

Additional Readings: Lida Junghans, “Industrial Involution: recruitment and development within the railway system,” in Eyferth, ed., How China Works, Routledge 2006; Stephen Kotkin: Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization, University of

California Press 1995, chapters 1-2.

Week 5: Chores

• Rita Felski, “The Invention of Everyday Life,” New Formations, no. 39 (Winter 1999-2000), pp. 13-31.

• Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times, Introduction, chapters 2 and 3.

• Joshua Goldstein, “The Remains of the Everyday: One Hundred Years of Recycling in Beijing,” in Joshua Goldstein and Madeleine Yue Dong, Everyday Modernity in China, pp. 260-301.

• Xue Yanwen 薛炎文: Piaozheng Jiushi 票证旧事 (Old stories on Rationing Coupons).

Additional Readings: Yan Hairong, “Rurality and Labor Process Autonomy: The Question of Subsumption in the Waged Labor of Domestic Service,” Cultural Dynamics vol. 18, no 5 (March 2006) (on domestic servants under Maoism and today); Wang Anyi, Fuping （novel on baomu in the Shanghai of the 1950s）, Jean C. Robinson, “Of Women and Washing Machines: Employment, Housework, and the Reproduction of Motherhood in Socialist China, China Quarterly, no. 101 (March 1985); Emily Honig and Gail Hershatter, Personal Voices: Chinese Women in the 1980s.

Week 6: Play

• Leon Trotsky, Problems of Life (also translated as Problems of Everyday Life), London: Methuen and Co., 1924, ch. 2, “Habit and Custom,” ch. 3, “Vodka, Church, and Cinema.”

• Wang Shaoguang: "The Politics of Private Time: Changing Leisure Patterns in Urban China”, in Davis et al. eds., Urban Spaces in Contemporary China.

• Tina Mai Chen, “Internationalism and Cultural Experience: Soviet Films and Popular Chinese Understandings of the Future in the 1950s.” Cultural Critique 58 (Fall 2004): 82-114.

• Film T.B.A.

Week 7: Things

• Stephen Connors: “Rough Magic: Bags,” in Ben Highmore, The Everyday Life Reader, pp. 347-351.

• Boris Arvatov, “Everyday Life and the Culture of the Thing,” October, vol. 81 (Summer 1997).

• Frank Dikotter, Exotic Commodities: Modern Objects and Everyday Life, Columbia University Press 2006, Introduction.

• Wu Xiujie, “Men Purchase, Women Use.” (Draft Article).

Week 8: Pain

• Guo Yuhua 郭于华: “Xinling de jitihua: Shaanbei Jibeicun nongye hezuohua denuxing jiyi” 心灵的集体化：陕北骥村农业合作化的女性记忆

(Collectivization of the soul: women’s memories of cooperativization in Jibei village, Shaanxi)

• Gail Hershatter: “Birthing Stories: Rural Midwives in 1950s China,” in Jeremy Brown and Paul Pickowicz, eds., Dilemmas of Victory: The Early Years of the People’s Republic of China.

Week 9: Memory

• Natalia Kozlova, “The Diary as Initiation and Rebirth: Reading Everyday Documents of the Early Soviet Era,” in Christina Kiaer and Eric Naiman, eds., Everyday Life in Early Soviet Russia: Taking the Revolution Inside, pp. 282-292.

• Liu Xin: “Remember to forget: critique of a critical case study,” in Historiography East and West, 2:1 (2004)

• Gail Hershatter: “The Gender of Memory: Rural Chinese Women and the 1950s”

• Selected Chinese diaries.

Week 10: Wrap Up